The present invention relates to a human machine interface (HMI) device for operating at least one technical facility.
Technical facilities are operated increasingly with the aid of digital, programmable devices. These may often also represent an automation system and/or may be a component of such a system. Here, technical facilities are understood to be all types of technical devices and systems, arranged both individually and in an arrangement in which they are networked with one another to exchange data via a field bus, for example. Technical facilities are thus to be understood to include individual operating means in, for example, the framework of an industrial application, such as drives and processing machines. However, an entire production facility, in which, among other things, an entire technical process is performed using locally distributed operating means, for example, in a chemical installation, a manufacturing installation, or a processing installation, is also considered a technical facility.
The programmable devices used to control technical facilities have a continually increasing functional scope. In addition to decentralizing the operating means of such a device and networking the operating means via bus systems, the ease of operation of these devices is becoming more and more significant. Thus, distributed automation systems in particular may have special devices which form the interface between an operator and the automation system.
Such devices are generally referred to as HMI devices, HMI being an abbreviation of the term “human machine interface.” Furthermore, it has become typical to refer to this device class as devices for “operator control and monitoring” of technical facilities. These devices, which are frequently situated upstream from devices used for direct control of a technical facility, have increasing functionality.
An overview of the functional scope of HMI devices may be obtained, for example, by examining Internet sites of Siemens AG, the Automation & Drives division, under http://www.ad.siemens.de/simatic/html—76/intro/hmi.htm or http://www.ad.siemens.de/hmi/html—00/index.htm. Furthermore, an abundance of product information about HMI devices and systems may be found by activating a typical Internet search engine, such as GOOGLE, under the address http://www.google.de, for example by entering a search concept such as “human machine interface.”
The concept of an HMI device is to be understood as a generic concept and includes all of the components associated with this device group, e.g., “operator panels,” which are often also referred to in abbreviated form as “OP.” HMI devices have an increasing functionality and assume, for example, in a networked automation system, functions which may generally be considered as preprocessing and postprocessing of data of the technical facility to be controlled. Not only is an additional central control device, e.g., a stored-program controller (SPC), relieved in this way. Rather, through an HMI device, functions are made possible which significantly improve the comfort and the quality of operation by an operator, i.e., particularly the supervision of the unit to be operated and the correctness of operations.
Therefore, in many cases an HMI device provides at least an interactive overview and/or process image of the technical facility to be operated, which, among other things, may also be directly configured with the HMI device using special software. In this way, on the one hand, it is possible to provide purposeful selection of operating actions in order to transfer the technical facility into a respective desired state. On the other hand, it is also possible to provide purposeful display of reactions of the technical facility, largely in the form of measured values and signals. In this way, reliable observation of the state of the technical facility is ensured. In this regard, fault signals, which signal an undesired state of the technical facility and, as a rule, have the purposeful input of operating actions by an operator into the HMI device as a consequence, assume a special position. These operating actions are to influence the fault event of the technical facility which generated the fault signal in such a way that the technical facility assumes a desired state again if at all possible.